Discussing racism, an acquaintance of mine once told me that state-sponsored racial discrimination (read "affirmative action") was absolutely necessary because "people are fundamentally racist." Only government, he said, could lessen racism's effects. I then asked, "If people are fundamentally racist, and the government is composed of people, then how can government action do any good?"
The ensuing exchange is not important here. What struck me about my opponent's argument was its underlying rationale that individuals would surely fail, but an "official" organization would clearly succeed. To my mind, this was an example of a widespread pitfall: uncritical reliance on institutions.
By "institution" I mean any large organization that makes, enforces, or influences law, policy, or public opinion. This includes government agencies, professional organizations, colleges and universities, and public school systems. Such institutions are normally set up to perform some important function, like educating young people or defending the coasts or furthering understanding of the human mind. In principle this is no bad thing, since a disciplined organization can often accomplish far more than individuals working alone (the military is a case in point). It's also nice to be able to relinquish certain responsibilities, such as teaching calculus to your high-schooler.
But power can be used for good or ill, and if you delegate responsibility, you'd better check up on your agents from time to time. Sadly, people seem to have lost sight of this, happily ceding more and more responsibility to institutions, from the police (those who will not own guns) to the schools (those who do not monitor what their children are taught) to the federal government (those who wish to nationalize health care). It can be as simple as seeing the FDA approval stamp on a bottle of vitamins and thinking, "Oh, well, these must be all right then," and not giving it another thought.
Indeed, not only do we blindly trust existing institutions, we often react to problems by creating new ones, such as the Department of Energy, or the national school board set up by the so-called "Goals 2000" act, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Such supposed guardians can quickly slip their leashes; OSHA has power to dictate the exact heights of factory railings and imposes huge burdens on small businesses without regard to cost-benefit checks.
The consequences of such overreliance on institutions can be serious, especially since institutions wield so much influence. That influence was why the Left fought so hard to tear down the "Establishment" back in the 1960s. The radicals realized that institutions play a large role in shaping morals, perceptions, and values. The irony is that now the Left is the Establishment, and it is fighting just as hard to keep hold of the institutions it controls: academia, the mainstream media, the federal judiciary, and the education system, to name a few.
This sort of power can work wonders. At the stroke of a pen, a liberal judge can negate the will of the people on term limits or gay rights or welfare for illegal aliens or whatever. Left-leaning journalists can report on Republican "cuts" in Medicare, whether they exist or not. The American Psychiatric Association can quietly revise the definition of pedophilia so that it's a disorder only if the pedophile doesn't like being a pedophile. (The APA did this in 1995, having done the same for homosexuality in 1973; see the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, version IV. They'll be reading Lolita in the first grade the next thing we know.)
A related problem is uncritical reliance on "experts" who have been trained by such institutions. Far from knowledgeable or trustworthy, such "experts" are often the most purblind, bumbling, yammering yahoos this side of Elmer Fudd. Nowhere is this clearer than in education, whence came the geniuses that brought us New Math, outcome-based education, look-say, and its current incarnation, "whole language." (If you've never heard of "whole language," imajn if ths clmn wr spld lik ts.) These days, a teacher's certificate should make parents less trusting, not more.
All this should demonstrate that institutions, and the degrees, honors, powers, and licenses they confer, are not automatically worthy of our trust and can easily do more harm than good. It seems a natural tendency to lean on them as sources of authority. But as with any authority, adults have a duty to check up on them every now and then, and to remember that no institution is a substitute for sound individual judgment.
John Keisling did not learn English via "whole language" and is therefore an expert speller. He is a math Ph.D. candidate whose column appears Wednesdays.
John Keisling
Columnist